Hefty Is Giving You a Break From This Terrible Election By Trashing Those Nasty Political Ads

A clever stunt from Havas

If you're tired of seeing nasty political ads running across the internet leading up to the election, Hefty has a plan to wipe the web clean of them for the next few days.

Beginning today, Hefty ads, reading "This political ad has been trashed thanks to Hefty," will replace all banner ads and potential political ads on a handful of websites including CNN's homepage. Hefty also purchased ad space on Fox News, AOL and the Huffington Post's politics page.

Hefty is not only buying up banner ads, but it will also run them as pre-roll on videos. Instead of 30 seconds of an ad, possibly a political one, this six-second clip will run instead.

The idea for the campaign came from a Marist Poll for the Knights of Columbus, which found that nearly 80 percent of the 1,000-plus people surveyed said they were fed up with negative political ads. Sixty-four percent felt negative ads significantly harm the political process, while 56 percent feel the tone of these ads is "uncivil and disrespectful."

With that in mind, Havas created a digital campaign for Hefty that hopefully takes some of these trashy political ads out of sight. "It was more of a timely reaction to the social sentiment that we've picked up on," Jason Peterson, chief creative officer at Havas Chicago, said. The campaign came to fruition over the last week as Havas began picking up on the strong, negative language throughout this election from both sides of the aisle.

The goal for the digital political takeover, Peterson said, is to build "a brand relationship with consumers in a modern way. Hefty is about ultimate strength when it comes to trash, I think this is a great analogy for this product. It shows that they kind of get it, they understand what you are feeling and are empathetic to you."